Book News: “Ulysses” is Eight Per Cent Regret, Keats is a Hundred Per Cent Romantic

“Keats emerges as a calorific, occasionally even robust figure, who thought nothing of walking 600 miles in Scotland and cultivated a rakish, Byronic allure. In 1819, bizarrely, he considered joining forces in Latin America with Simón Bolívar.” Ian Thomson on a new biography that paints an unexpected portrait of Keats.

Robert Graysmith on the real Tom Sawyer—a charismatic fireman who was one of Mark Twain’s drinking buddies.

“There’s an inherent danger in that combination of great power and secrecy.” An interview with Seth Rosenfeld about his book on student radicals and the F.B.I.

“It’s precisely in the work of art that we can explore, for the sake of life outside that work, the most extreme and troubling implications of our presumptions about the aesthetic.” Joshua Weiner on difficult poetry.